Hangman (DC Comics)
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In the fictional DC Universe, the Hangman is an enemy of Batman. He is featured in the graphic novel miniseries Batman: Dark Victory.
[edit] Plot Overview
Hangman is a serial killer who murders police officers on every holiday of the year, leaving behind a version of the children's word game "Hangman" (with key letters missing) in with each new victim. During the events of Batman: The Long Halloween (to which Dark Victory is a sequel), Batman captured and imprisoned Alberto Falcone, the serial killer known as Holiday who murdered members of the Falcone crime family on holidays (although Harvey Dent's wife Gilda claims to have been the first Holiday, and technically, by murdering Alberto's father, Carmine Falcone, in the final issue of The Long Halloween, Dent himself is the final Holiday killer). A while later, the Hangman murders begin.
Batman enlists the help of Commissioner Gordon, but is sidetracked by a personal tragedy: his friend and partner, District Attorney Harvey Dent, is horribly scarred by a criminal he is prosecuting, bringing out into the open his latent multiple personality disorder and transforming him into a violent crime boss. Now known as Two-Face, Dent wreaks havoc on Gotham City and forces Batman to confront his former ally.
In the end, the Hangman is revealed to be Sofia Falcone Gigante, daughter of the late crime boss. After seeing her father murdered by Two-Face, Sofia charges forward and is restrained by Catwoman. During the struggle, Catwoman scars the right side of Sofia's face and the two tumble out a window. In Dark Victory Catwoman tells Batman that when Sofia fell, her bolo/whip became tangled around Sofia's neck. The whip then caught on a stone gargoyle and threw Sofia through another window, and the broken glass sheared off the right side of her face. Catwoman (who, in this interpretation, is Falcone's illegitimate daughter) follows Sofia to Europe where she undergoes plastic surgery to restore the damage done to her face.
Sofia, who appears in a wheelchair for the majority of Dark Victory, is shown with the left side of her face scarred, which we find she did herself after the surgery to be closer to her father's spirit (who was himself scarred by Catwoman in Batman: Year One). Catwoman tells Batman she was able to find the doctor who treated her ruined face, but not one who treated her paralysis. Her paralysis was a ruse, however, to appear weak and avoid being a suspect in the Hangman murders (interestingly in issue #8, "Battle", the Joker deducts this, but is ambushed by Batman before he can truly test his theory.) All of the victims of the Hangman murders are police officers who, in one way or another, helped Harvey Dent rise to his position of District Attorney. Her final target is Two-Face himself, although Batman saves him and Dent kills Sofia with a gunshot to the head. Batman receives some additional help from Dick Grayson, a young orphan he adopts as his ward and trains as his sidekick, Robin. In essence, Dark Victory is a Robin origin story with a year's worth of context around it, much like The Long Halloween is essentially a Two-Face origin story with a year's worth of context.
